


To Let Myself Go

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Alcohol, Antiva, Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 11:59:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3568808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The tipping point between tolerating one's role and embracing it. Zevran, age sixteen, comes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Let Myself Go

It might perhaps be cool inside the thick stone walls of the building were it not home to so many people: large rooms of the old villa re-partitioned into a series of tiny apartments, rows of bunks for the youngest and individual rooms for the oldest, with space for a cot and a writing-desk. This was a fashionable area, once—three centuries ago, say. Its fortunes have changed, and young apprentice assassins live here now in one of the oldest remaining buildings, between tanneries and shipyards and sluggish canals. The air is thick with the comfortably familiar smell of rotting flesh and piss, the pitch and bitumen of the shipyards hardly more than a faint undertone. Zevran, standing tired and aching in the hall, thinks he should have known nowhere else would actually be home. You can take the Crow out of Antiva City, but… well, never mind that. He is not yet a Crow, anyway.

The stairwell is very high and open, bare, a space naturally inclined to produce echoes. he treads lightly up the curving flight of stone steps. It is a game to play with oneself, to pass up to the third floor without attracting attention. There's plenty of value to surprising people, after all—lovers, enemies, marks. Not that there have been any of this last category, as yet, but it will be time soon enough. 

He has been away for weeks, now. His body aches from his welcome home. The pain of it is trying to stiffen every joint, and he is quite bruised, but his skin is unbroken—they have done it very well, of course. Very competently. Upstairs, he hopes, a bottle of wine is waiting for him—unless Petrona has taken it, but then she will just have to be convinced to replace it.

Alcohol is a marvelous thing. To drink from chipped cups, sitting cross-legged on his bed with one or two companions, laughing, telling taller and taller tales, allowing any pain one feels to become a little more distant. One is not meant to relax, of course, it would not be the thing—but one can pretend, for a while. They all do it. Sex is practically encouraged, not that he would refrain if it were frowned upon. It is pleasant to please others—in bed, at least. Sometimes in other places. 

Naturally, all of this is training too, of an informal sort. Private study. They are all crammed in together here to scheme and mess around and learn from their copious mistakes. Don't trust anyone, don't think sex is love—drink, but keep your wits. Isn't learning enjoyable?

That's the idea, at least. The results are mixed.

Upstairs, Vico's door is open, and Petrona is leaning against the frame, face turned away from him. She is silhouetted against light from the tall window within the apartment, quite a beautiful outline, but all the same, Zevran hears them before he sees them, half-intelligible phrases floating around the curve of the stairs, Petrona's filthy laugh. "He won't be back, I'll bet you a sovereign. He's buried, I'm telling you. Or in the sea. It was always going to happen, the jumped-up little shit."

Vico, milder: "Much good that bet will do me, when I know you don't have a sovereign any more than I do."

They are talking about me, Zevran thinks, with all the confidence of an absolute egotist. Or perhaps it is some actual instinct which tells him so. How careless of them.

"Well," Vico says, after a considering lull in their conversation, "Zevran was not _so_ bad."

"Was? So you admit he is dead."

Zevran cannot see, but he knows that Vico is shrugging his shoulders, perfectly indolent, as he always is when not pressed. "Well, he is not here, at least, so I hardly see that it makes much difference. But who knows… they shut Ria and some of that lot in an oubliette last summer, didn't they? And they came back. You may not be free of him yet."

My friends, my friends, Zevran thinks, horribly amused, and slows his steps, breathes very carefully. I wonder which of us will try to slit the other's throat first, whenever it comes to that. 

They do not hear him passing behind them on the landing. His door makes the smallest noise of protest when he eases it closed behind him, and perhaps Petrona looks up at that, sharp and wary—if she does not, she is a fool. But he has not, he thinks, been seen. Better yet, there is his wine.

I will offer them some, he thinks. There is a certain appeal to drinking alone, but on the whole, distraction is better. Perhaps they will sleep with him. As far as he's aware, Petrona does consider that sort of thing to be his only real use.

 

 

 

"Ten of them," Zevran says. "All heavily armed. And that was not even the most exciting part! The duke, you see—but ah, I should not tell you. It is quite secret."

"You're a terrible liar," Petrona says, but she does not need to believe him—only to be amused by him. He thinks she is.

"Thank you, my darling," he says, and falls back against the bed as she laughs at him—so wonderfully merciless. But he has had too much to drink and not enough to eat, and his stomach twists queasily. He sighs. "It will be so very dull to go back to all the usual backstabbing, you know."

"Oh yes," she says. "I'm _sure._ "

 

 

 

The schoolhouse of the Crows is another venerable and much-modified building, sprawling down the hillside just south of the river in a series of connected terraced levels, bright plaster-covered walls half-swallowed by spreading vines, fine rounded arches lining courtyards. Lecture rooms and libraries, workshops and, of course, torture chambers—if one wants to be dramatic about it. It has many functions and is, perfectly intentionally, a maze. 

It is eight years since the last time Zevran was lost here. He is sixteen years old, and quite definitely going to be the best Crow in Antiva given, say, another six months. A year, at the outside. He has nowhere else to be, so why not, he thinks, and wants to laugh, though it might come out tinged with hysteria. Best not.

He studies his elders, watches how they move; anything they can do, he will do better. If he does not fit anywhere else—and certainly he does not, this much has now been established—he will fit perfectly here.

"For some of you, the greatest enemy is overconfidence—the belief that you are above this type of basic study," Master Antino is saying as Zevran slips in through one of the highest doors of the anatomy theatre. Apprentices from all cells pulled together for a good telling off under the official heading of practical demonstration. Verina smirks up at him from the third bench down, and Zevran treats her to an unbothered shrug. 

”Ah, so kind of Zevran to join us today,” Antino says. Of course he would not miss the chance. ”I was just alluding to you.”

”You wound me terribly,” Zevran says. ”Mortally, even.”

”I rather think not." Antino's smile is unreadable. "But perhaps another day.”

"Something for everyone to look forward to," Zevran says, with a mocking little bow. "Don't let me interrupt."

Antino does not; has turned away before Zevran has found a seat. Vessels of the body, the flow of blood; he lectures but holds himself above the actual business of the thing. In his assistant's hand, a sharp little knife moves precisely.

"You should watch your step," Verina murmurs as Zevran slips into the empty space beside her. 

"Oh?" Zevran says. "Such concern for my health. But do you really suppose anyone here cares a bit for my personality, so long as I work well?"

"You were gone all that time while they did maker knows what with you and you're still talking like this," Verina says. "I'd almost be impressed, if it weren't so damned stupid. Now shut up, before the old arse decides he needs a new body for the table after all."

Zevran finds himself having to suppress laughter again. The entire thing is too ridiculous. Run away to live with the Dalish, like a romantic fool—and even crawling back home in disgrace doesn't have quite the drama he'd pictured. 

But it will have to do.


End file.
